The Big Meow - Diana Dueyn

She headed off toward the nearest of the big stones, being careful to keep it between her and that dim light down by the doorway. Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Hwaith said.

I’m not seeing much of anything, Rhiow said as they got closer to the stone: her eyes were bothering her more and more as she tried to focus on the thing.

Not that, Rhiow. Look at the strings!

Unusually for a gate technician, she had been paying little attention to the hyperstring structure in the area. Now Rhiow made the little mental shift necessary to alter the way she was seeing the physical world, and the hyperstrings in the area sprang into view. But she didn’t see the normal relatively straight warp and weft of brilliant lines that grossly marked the structure on which the physical universe was hung. Here the lines of force invisibly filling the air were all warped out of shape, unnaturally bundled together around the circle, as if they were writhing away from the stones in the circle.

It wasn’t the stones themselves that were the major force disrupting the string structures, however. It was the hard-to-see diagram dug into the rammed clay in the circle’s center. All right, Rhiow said silently, we knew something like this would probably be here… She moved forward cautiously, avoiding the chance of touching any of the stones, and watching where she put her feet to make sure she didn’t come in contact with any of the figure inscribed into the ground. Even if the thing was composed entirely of fragments of charms, it was entirely capable of containing “tripwires” that would alert whoever had drawn it.

From way down the cavern, near the wall, she caught a flash of Urruah’s eyes as he paused near the kerosene lamp to look back her way. This is so un-Hollywood, he said. There should be all kinds of evil carved figures, a big dais, a sacrificial altar…

We’ve got more than enough nasty stuff here without starting to complain about the aesthetics, Rhiow said, pausing at the edge of the diagram and looking it over. Behind her, Hwaith was circling past one of the stones to her left to get another angle on it.

Rhiow had been half expecting either a clumsy aggregation of mangled Speech-symbols or one of the peculiar but nonfunctional spell diagrams that had percolated down through ehhif popular culture from medieval times, some farrago of alchemical symbols, ancient languages and confused numerology. But this was neither. Scratched in the ground the diagram might be, no polished work, but all the essential elements of a spell circle were here. Inside a series of nested envelopment circles and intersecting power management rhomboids were many long and intricately interconnected statements in the Speech. Rhiow knew she could spend a good while teasing out the fine details, but the overall structure made the spell’s purpose clear. It was meant to contain and trap power funneled into it from outside, and it was full of symbols and contractions that had to do with the confinement of extracted life force. The means of extraction were obvious enough: the broad bloodstains were still in place, the color plain even though the clotted blood had been scraped away. With the blood, soaked into the ground under the spell circle, she could feel the remnants of many previous ehhif attempts to contact dark forces and twist their power to the ehhifs’ will. Blood had been spilled then too, though with far less focused purpose than most recently. Rhiow looked away from the biggest pool and saw something that in its way troubled her more: the eight stones dropped here and there on focus points of the circle’s inner diagrams. At least they looked like stones at first. But if they were stones, then someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to carve each one into the likeness of an ehhif’s torn-out or cut-out heart…

Rhiow shook her head at the low, angry, hungry buzzing noise that was getting louder every minute while she stood inside the stone circle. Here one could clearly hear sa’Rraah’s little minions, and sense them thronging thickly around, just as Arhu said. You could feel them in the air but most especially in the ground, through your feet, as if yellowjackets had buried nests everywhere under the floor. The shadow-imps were reacting, not just to the presence of wizards here, but to the greedy and ambitious ehhif who had once again been stirring up that old pool of darkness with their desire to control it. And more so than usual, Rhiow thought, because this time the stakes are so much higher. This time sa’Rraah has so much more to gain if the ehhif’s endeavor succeeds…

Out at the edge of the circle of stones, Aufwi had slipped out of the shadows to examine the circle more closely. There was definitely a gate here, Rhiow, he said. You can see where the ambient string structure’s deformed by the material memory in the floor of the previous gate anchoring, and there are some temporary mooring receptacles still sunk underneath this circle. But some time in the recent past the gate was moved to that temporary anchorage we found upstairs… maybe while somebody was working on it who didn’t want to be down here all the time.

I can understand that, Rhiow said, for that dark buzzing at the edge of things was getting more and more unbearable. And something else was troubling her: an increasing sense of being buried, buried alive, buried in ground that nonetheless was thinking about moving, moving the first chance it got, killing everything… She shook herself, told herself to stay focused. Anyway, it’s not up there now. And it’s not down here. Where’ve they got it stowed? Because whatever gate was operating here was extremely powerful, on a par with a hardwired permanent gate. It has to have deranged everything else for miles around whenever it went operational. No wonder the formally emplaced gates in the area have been acting so badly….

She glanced over at Hwaith, whose tail was fluffed out to about three times its size as he stared at the spell diagram. Gating issues were plainly far from his mind right now. Rhiow, this is very bad, he said. This isn’t just some clueless ehhif dabbling. This is professional stuff.

Her tail lashed in agreement. It’s unquestionably the Speech, Rhiow said. Unquestionably a spell. But now we’re left with the question: how could it possibly ever enact? No wizard in the Powers’ service would ever build a spell like this. Or expect anything to come of it —

Yet then Rhiow had to stop, for at least once now she’d seen a wizard working in a Power’s service because it knew no other source of power… and his spells had enacted. But that was in another universe, a whole pocket world in the Downside that the Lone One had subverted to its own intentions. This is the Powers’ world. This kind of thing can’t work here –

It can if the wizard’s physical tie to Them has been completely severed, Hwaith said, his voice full of pity and dread. And all that remains is a soul-shell that walks and speaks and hates…

Her eyes met his in the dark, widening in realization. And down at the end of the cavern, the door opened and ehhif started filing in.

Swiftly and silently Rhiow and Hwaith fled for the walls, staying in the shadows. Those writhed and darkened now in the light of the tall torches some of the ehhif were bearing in with them. In and in they came, making for the circle of stones, the line of approaching ehhif parting around it as they came near: one to the left, the next to the right, left, right… They were all dressed in long dark blood-colored garments, and the embroidery on these caught the torchlight here and there with brief glints of gold and silver as the ehhif moved to surround the rings of stones.

Robes, Urruah said softly. They’re wearing robes with ‘arcane’ symbols on them. Do you believe this?

You were the one who was wanting this situation to get more filmic! Rhiow said. But I wouldn’t mock. Anything that makes it easier for whichever of them is really behind this sordid business isn’t to be ridiculed, much though we might feel like it. And these people live in Drama Central, by definition. Her tail lashed. But Ruah, feel for yourself! Not one of these people is a wizard —

A last shape came in through the door at the cavern’s end, himself carrying something in his hands that Rhiow couldn’t make out, something small and dark and hard to make out against his clothes. Slowly he came, like the person in whose honor the first part of the procession had been staged. He too was wearing a robe, but it was dead black, without any arcana embroidered on it. Elwin Dagenham’s pale hands and his white face, in this dark place, seemed almost to float along by themselves, bodiless, a most peculiar effect.

He took up the one position in the circle that had been left open for him, and stood there a moment, looking around in the torchlit dimness with an expression of supreme satisfaction. Rhiow was astonished again at the difference in Dagenham, for he was now completely unlike the diffident little figure from the party; he was holding himself more erect, looking more prideful, far more in control. Robes or no robes, Dagenham looked like he had a purpose in which he believed implicitly and which made him far greater than he allowed others in the daylight world to believe.

“Friends,” he said, “tonight is the night.” And that pallid little voice that Rhiow had only before heard cajoling, pleading, flattering, now was also completely changed. It filled the place, even in that space where the raw earth of the walls should have deadened sound. “We’ve drunk the cup and welcomed our new member to the society of the friends of the Great Old One.” He nodded in the direction of one small robed figure.

Rhiow looked at her pale face and recognized a woman who she’d last seen being walked out of the upstairs toilet in Dagenham’s: Dorothy, who nodded to all the others, wearing a smile that Rhiow suspected was just this side of going small and scared. Beside her, a taller figure, that handsome face showing above the robes: the man who had been kissing her. Rhiow looked down and thought she saw brown wingtips.

“And now we get down to business,” Dagenham said. “The other friends of the Great Old One, the Strong Ones, have done us many favors in past months. Careers have been rescued, personal harms have been avenged, wealth and influence have been showered on us. And the Strong Ones ask so little of us in return! This month they ask for more than usual… but this week they will give us far more than usual, more than we’ve ever dared to dream. Let’s honor them!”

Everyone in the circle bowed, but it was Dagenham they bowed to. He stood there, his head high, receiving their homage as if he was actually entitled to it. There was something so histrionic, so theatrical, about the gesture, that Rhiow suddenly suspected she understood him as fully as she needed to. The Lone One’s little friends, or sa’Rraah herself, had offered him the one thing that would be sweetest to him: to be a leader, for a change, instead of the one who was forced to follow the rich and powerful and beautiful, arranging their contacts with the news media and picking up what crumbs of gratitude they dropped. Here, among these people, he was more: still a facilitator and a conduit, but one who now stood on the brink of power unimaginable to the people he’d been forced until now to serve.

“This is the night of nights,” Dagenham said. “Now at last the final piece of the puzzle falls into place, and we come into our own…” Under what he was saying, the dark buzzing had fallen into step with the rhythm of his words, reinforcing them, pulsing in time with them, so that the group circled around the stones seemed to start to sway a little in time with the buzzing.

He’s sold, body and soul, Rhiow thought, caught between pity and disgust. Sa’Rraah has him under her paw. Worse: Tepeyollotl the Eater has him. Dagenham already sees himself as King of the World. Yet he hasn’t thought it through. He really must not understand that the position won’t last him past the time when the sky tears open and the darkness floods in. Or he’s convinced himself otherwise. He’s too used to a world where every contract can be renegotiated if your lawyer’s just good enough…

“The Great Old One is with us now,” Dagenham said, his eyes catching the light of the torches as he turned, “here in His strong place: the one who’s lived forever in the old darkness under the hills and behind time. And His friends the Strong Ones are with us, all around us. Can’t you hear them, singing the song of power as they have before? But this time, they sing it differently – this time, more strongly than ever before. Because after what we’ve done for them in these last weeks, and these last few days in particular, they’re finally about to start coming into their own. Because of how we’ve helped them, they will rule the world. We, their friends, we will soon be princes of the Earth, and all the people who’ve been running things forever, telling us what to do forever, will soon find that the old order has changed. We are the new order. The old night has come to put an end to the new day we were promised, the day that hasn’t turned out to be worth having! The great and the powerful have spent four years and endless lives squabbling over something that at the end of the day just doesn’t matter. Now it’s time to turn to other powers, older powers. And one that has the power to truly change the world – “

You have no idea! Rhiow thought. But now we get to the meat of it –

“And now they send their servant – “

From the darkness out at the edge of the shadows came a dark form. Not robed, but all cloaked in a shadow that moved heavily as if she wore one, the Dark Lady came. She was as tall and beautiful and cold as she’d been in Arhu’s revisioning. Her face was half obscured by the darkness around her as if by a veil, strangely recalling the veil she’d worn as the Silent Man and his friends had seen her on that rainy night.

As she slowly came closer, in utter silence, Rhiow and everyone else in her team could immediately feel the spell circle pulse once, awakening, the way a persona-keyed wizardry will pulse in confirmation as the one who designed it comes near. Outside the outermost ring of stones, she stopped, and simply stood there still as a statue.

“Here she is,” Dagenham was saying in a great voice, “the Great Old One’s messenger to us, she who taught us the Rite of the Eater and showed us what to do to make him our friend. She is the one who will open the way for him now, and rest in His darkness forever after! All do her honor, for she is the one who will free Him, and us, and give us the world!”

All the robed figures bowed, and from one of them came a delighted laugh: a little tinkly voice that brought Rhiow’s ears right around, for she knew it all too well. It instantly brought back to her the feeling of being helpless and upside down, clutched against a bosom all doused in a mixture of cheap perfumes. She was tempted to hiss. But she was distracted from that as she caught a movement in the darkness: a glint of light, the slightest movement. Eyes, eyes under the veil, narrowing at the sound of the laugh. Just a flash of anger, of terror.

And at the same moment, Rhiow heard one word Whispered in her ear. She took the hint.

She fixed all her attention on the Dark Lady, all her intention. Laurel! Rhiow said to her, silently, as forcefully as she could.